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Daily Archives: February 2, 2011

I’m going to show you some mittens that got finished today.. and I’m going to confess to you that I think they are my bestest favourites. I love them. I love them so much that I would marry them, take their last name, and happily do their laundry for the rest of my life and that’s saying something. I started with some very pretty mawata- that’s another way of saying silk hankies. (My painted ones came from Blue Moon.) I pulled the mawata apart, one layer at a time, then attenuated them into a something (very vaguely) resembling a light worsted weight yarn, and made mittens. Plain mittens. No bells, no whistles, no cables, no lace – just the ordinary mitten pattern I keep in my head for emergencies, but the results are so very anything but ordinary. The mittens I ended up with weigh only 30g- which isn’t so terribly light really, for reference, the beer mittens from yesterday were 35g, so they aren’t freakishly light, but the difference is in the warmth.

Silk is about 4 times warmer that wool- closer to cashmere, and so these babies are hand ovens. 100% pure silk, super, super soft hand ovens. They’re cozy like cocoa, they’re soft like silk (duh. I bet you saw that coming) but because they’re unspun mawata, they’re totally cushy and fluffy.Beyond cushy. They’re like – hand oven pillows or something. There have already been several attempts to steal them, so I’m thinking about putting strings on them. Not so I don’t lose them, but as a security measure because I think it’s going to be what it takes to keep people from making off with them. These mittens are in fact, so high-risk, that a friend has offered to wrestle me for possession. I have reminded her of several things. I reminded her of the definition of "friend" and how it generally excludes violence. I reminded her that one does not – in a moral and just civilization, usually have to wrestle another middle-aged woman in your kitchen to maintain property. Furthermore (I suggested) that’s not a good offer. Wrestling totally isn’t my style. I’m not very big, but I am quite quick. That makes me more of the fleeing type than the wrestling type. I have a full on, flat out, crush on my mittens… and no. I won’t wrestle you for them. They’re mine.